William Barksdale

Barksdale was a lawyer who gave up the bar to edit the Columbus Mississippi Democrat, a pro-slavery paper, and a Fire-Eater in Congress who resigned after Mississippi seceded. By 1860 he owned 36 enslaved people and a large plantation. At Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, his brigade charged the Peach Orchard; he was hit three times, and he died the next morning in a Union field hospital. His body was exhumed in 1867 and later buried in Jackson, and he has cenotaphs there and in Friendship Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 5.1 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Waverley Mansion — 11 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 19 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 30 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Sandfield Cemetery — 3.5 mi
• R.E. Hunt High School — 4.0 mi
• Queen City Hotel (Blues Trail) — 4.3 mi
• MUW Founders — 4.4 mi